Typically in the prior art, a call arriving at an automatic call directing switch are placed in a queue and given to the next agent available. A single dimension modification of this approach was to search first through the most qualified group of agents and then check a secondary group who is actually more qualified on another subject but has enough capability to handle the particular subject matter involved and have that subject matter as their secondary responsibility. In other words, a primary call queue first checks the primary responsibility agents of a given agent group and then a secondary call queue checks the secondary responsibility agents for that agent group.
A second single dimension approach taken by the prior art to reduce the waiting time in case the primary responsibility agents are all busy is to place an incoming call in two different agent group queues. There is a primary agent group queue and a secondary agent group queue. Each of the queues mentioned are part of a single agent group. The system then checks for a free agent in the first queue and then for a free agent in the second queue until an available agent is found.
While both of the one dimensional approaches to reducing the waiting time during busy periods provide benefits over the original approach, more improvement was needed. The present invention allows not only adding additional queues of agents up to a maximum of four but allows each queue to search first a primary group or set of agents and then a secondary responsibility group or set of agents. This effects a two dimensional expansion of the available number of agents for answering calls to reduce the waiting time over what would occur in the prior art approaches.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to minimize the waiting time for an incoming call to be connected to an agent by taking actions to connect the call to less qualified agents where necessary rather than wait for the availability of only a highly qualified agent.